The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Dick the Butcher, Act IV, Scene II, Henry VI, Part II. Contrary to what some wags believe, Shakespeare’s point, made through the dialogue of Dick the Butcher, was that the first thing to be done on the path to totalitarianism was to get rid of the lawyers, as they stand in the way. Like it or not, it’s what lawyers do.

During his Senate confirmation testimony, Secretary of Defense cum former Fox & Friends Weekend anchor Pete Hegseth stated that JAGoffs, as he calls them, get in the way of real warriors doing their lethal warrioring. From his perspective, it makes some sense. After all, military lawyers, Judge Advocates General, aren’t there to tell a soldier to fire at will, but to fire in accordance with the rules of engagement. Who likes rules when they really want to shoot people?

At the New York Times, David French writes about the significance of Trump’s firing the top JAG officers in each of the services. Having served as a JAG officer, he knows whereof he speaks.

Hegseth, for his part, has long expressed disdain for the role of military lawyers. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” he derisively referred to them as “jagoffs” and blamed them for restrictive rules of engagement and for war crimes prosecutions of American service members.

And Trump has even less use for the advice of counsel.

The problem is much more serious than a downgrading of qualifications. To understand why Trump might want to fire senior officers and replace them with people he perceives to be loyalists, you have to remember his first term and all the ways in which senior military officials actively resisted Trump’s worst and most brutal impulses.

Worst and most brutal impulses? Trump?

Trump’s next secretary of defense, Mark Esper, infuriated Trump in 2020 by publicly opposing the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which permits the president to deploy active duty troops to impose order in American cities. He also resisted Trump’s demand that law enforcement shoot protesters who were demonstrating outside the White House.

Esper recalls Trump saying in June 2020, inside the Oval Office: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Trump also repeatedly suggested shooting unarmed immigrants who were crossing the border, treating people seeking asylum in the United States as if they were part of an invading army.

It might be fair to argue that nobody, save a blithering idiot, would believe such actions might be remotely lawful and in need of legal advice. After all, who could possibly believe that shooting protesters in the legs was not just a good idea, but a lawful one? Who, indeed?

But the need for the Judge Advocates General going forward might not be nearly as obvious as the stable genius ideas that popped into Trump’s head on the last go round.

I’m intimately familiar with the role of JAG officers in the military. We serve as advisers to commanders. We do not command troops in combat. But legal standards are directly relevant to combat operations. They can dictate the tactics soldiers use, the weapons commanders deploy and the treatment of prisoners we capture.

Dismissing JAG officers doesn’t change the rules, but it can degrade the quality of the legal advice that commanders receive. If military lawyers are afraid to provide good-faith advice for fear that it will anger the nation’s political leadership, then the chances that American forces will make a catastrophic mistake skyrocket.

Consider, if you will, an order from the Commander-in-Chief that the military take to the streets of a city in the United States where people are expressing less than kind words about Trump, with the order to round them up, lock them up, and quell the problem with extreme prejudice. The command officer then turns to his JAG officer and asks, “Is this a lawful order? Can we do this? Posse comitatus something, something?” And the JAG officer says, “How dare you question the orders of your CIC. If he says shoot, you shoot. If he says do it, then it’s lawful because he’s the president.”

The military is obligated to follow the president’s lawful orders. It is not obligated to simply salute and say, “Yes sir” at every order he gives, and it should provide professional military advice if it believes an order is unwise.

This is part of the culture of the American military. I’ve seen subordinates offer respectful pushback when they believed commanders were making mistakes. I’ve never met a good commander who didn’t welcome the honest counsel of his subordinates; the best commanders sought it out.

In the event that things head south, say a president who refuses to abide the rulings of the courts even if he says he will, or a president who decides that people who don’t adore him are enemies of the state and need to be disposed of, the military commanders will have decisions to make, whether they will be the enforcers of illegality and insanity or the guardrails that prevent one megalomaniac from losing the Republic.

Providing honest counsel is fundamental to American military culture, but it is not part of Russia’s culture, and if there’s a theme to Trump’s second term so far, it’s not Make America Great Again; it’s Make America Into Russia. The Russian military is brutal and unthinkingly obedient — and that’s exactly what the president wants.

It will be a whole lot easier for the president to do whatever pops into his head if there is no one to tell the guys with guns that the order is unlawful and should not be obeyed. It may well be that the JAG replacements will provide honest counsel as well, or that military commanders know better than to start killing their fellow Americans in the street. But getting rid of known honest lawyers is the first thing Dick would do. And Trump too.